


the crooked curl of the snow glyph

by ERNest



Category: Drakon - A.M. Tuomala
Genre: Gen, Literary and Historical Analysis, Minor Violence, Poetry, Possible Character Death, the shape of words is important in this universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 06:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19126258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: A stanza out of context could easily be mistaken. Kesha learns a history not his own.





	the crooked curl of the snow glyph

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gileonnen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/gifts).



     Innokentiy Vladimirovich Tarasov walks the stone floor of an elaborate fencepost. These sigils, these words, these verses stretched out into sentences with less form but no less art, are not, as he supposed, individual recollections or musings on the beauty of the world. A stanza out of context could easily be mistaken for that, but linked together like a mountain range, they become one long unbroken history of a people that, once shattered, turned on itself as each side sought new allies and a new Voice.

     Kesha notes with no small disappointment that the dragons are no better than humans, no nobler, no less prone to petty fights. But, he soothes his thwarted idealism, the collision that formed the real mountains was _also_  a calamity. The dragons do not need to be noble or pure or above reproach to be great, and they do not even need to be great for them to be worth learning from them and about them.

     Before he can ask nearly as many questions as he wishes, history repeats, and one of the last poet-translators of a previous age is cut down for speaking out of turn. Not different from humans at all, really. Later, breathing hard in an alleyway and trying to look like an ordinary man on an ordinary Sunday, it hits him that if he’d frozen back there he would be dead. So instead he killed Boris Baivich as surely as if the claws which ripped out that scaled throat had belonged to him. How many times must he run from the scene of an old man’s murder? Will his presence ever mean something other than guilt?

     He cannot say.


End file.
